Saturday

She has entered a new life without angels, saints, prayer, forgiveness and heaven. It's unsettling at times.She told her story to a newly formed group called Recovering Religionists, or RR for short.'Religion was like a comfort blanket, and sometimes I miss that comfort,' said Price, of Prairie Village, Kan., at a recent gathering in Wyandotte County, Kan.The number of people unaffiliated with any particular faith has grown more rapidly than any other religious group in recent years. According to a 2007 Pew study, 16 percent of American adults say they don't belong to any religion, compared with 7 percent who were raised unaffiliated.The idea for the group came from Darrel Ray, an organizational psychologist and author of 'The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture.' He was raised in a fundamentalist Christian church and attended seminary. But by the time he graduated, he had abandoned the notion of becoming a minister.He was a member of the Quaker church for two years and then a Presbyterian Church for 10 years, where he taught Sunday school.'We lived in Leavenworth [Kan.] It's a small community, and a lot of social activities revolved around church,' he said. 'And I was a businessman, and there were good connections in church.' But by the time he was 40, he was divorced, his children were grown and he'd become an atheist.'I had seen over the years how hard it was for me to get out of religion and maintain proper social relationships with other people,' he said.In his family are ministers and people deeply involved in religion and missionary work.'It is almost easier to come out of the closet as gay than as an atheist, especially in the Midwest,' he said. 'My hope for RR is that when people are ready to leave religion they have a group for support.' The first RR meeting was in March. He announced it on the Internet, and 11 people showed up.That was too many for one group. He wants to keep each group smaller so people will feel free to share personal experiences. Cole Morgan of Olathe, Kan., volunteered to start a Johnson County, Kan., group, which had its second meeting this week.Kay Huddleston of Kansas City, Kan., is leading the Wyandotte group. Groups also have started in Joplin, Topeka, Atlanta and Cincinnati, and Ray has received inquiries from people in several other cities. He's also looking for someone to organize a local group on the Missouri side.The members all have a different story about how they decided religion was not for them.Morgan, a store manager, attended a conservative Southern Baptist Church with his parents, who were leaders in the congregation. He went 'when my parents made me.'

By age 13, he was finding jobs that required him to work on Sundays  mowing lawns, taking care of pets  anything to keep him from church.

In his 20s he was questioning religion, and by 35 he was an atheist.'I found too many contradictions between all of the religions and decided none of them could be right,' Morgan said.In the past year, he has became involved with skeptic, humanist, atheist and free-thought groups. One group sponsored a billboard last fall that read: 'Don't Believe in God? You are not alone.' A Web site and phone number were included.A few months ago, he and Ray met and discussed Recovering Religionists.'I liked the idea,' Morgan said. 'I sincerely feel a lot of people are afraid to come out of religion. They are unsure about how they feel about leaving religion and how to talk to their parents and children and friends about it.' Marshall Bass, who is helping Morgan with the Johnson County group, was a Catholic and went to college seminary thinking of becoming a priest.But as he studied the theology of his faith, he said, he found it to contradict science and his view of the world. After seminary, he stopped going to church, then returned a couple of years later but gradually stopped attending. Today he says he is an agnostic.'There was no ah-ha' moment,' Bass said. 'It was a gradual process.'I first concluded there probably is a God, but we just don't have an understanding of him. Eventually I got to the point that I do not affirm anything. I'll never be an atheist because there is just no way to prove there is no God.' He said he always has had an appreciation for science and believes only what he can find evidence for. He sees RR as an 'emotional outlet for people in the de-conversion process and a social outlet to replace the built-in social groups you find in most churches.' Huddleston started dreading going to church after conflict developed in her Baptist congregation.

She left and tried other churches but always found fault with some aspects of their teachings. She became exposed to a lot of different beliefs after moving to the mountains of Arizona with her second husband. These encounters caused her to question the things she believed, and she ended up 'completely letting go of Christianity.'

Her daughter, Loey Lockerby of Kansas City, Kan., also was questioning her beliefs, and the two of them started reading books by Bishop John Shelby Spong, Richard Dawkins and other skeptics. Lockerby is a freelance movie reviewer who often writes for The Star.Today, Huddleston calls herself a humanist and conceded there still are gray areas in her beliefs.She was interested in RR because she said people like herself need a place to go.

'People have walked away from religion,' she said. 'And it's OK to do that, and you're not going to be cursed to hell because of it.'

The Wyandotte County meeting demonstrated what Ray had in mind for RR. The six participants, including Ray, aired their grievances with religion and the difficulties they had encountered since leaving it.Lockerby expressed her dislike when church people say there is a greater purpose for everything.'Like people who say there's a purpose for the Holocaust,' said Charlie Williard of Kansas City, Mo.Another person asked what to do when people say they're going to pray for you. Do you just go along to not hurt their feelings or do you say you don't believe in prayer?Everyone around the table had a different opinion.David Summerly of Kansas City, Mo., who had been a Mormon, said he had tried to push his religion on his father. This put up a barrier between them, and Summerly regrets they did not have a better relationship before his father died.In leaving the church he gave up always having answers to everything.'Now I can't always find an answer,' he said. 'But that's OK.'Also when I was a Mormon, I had this huge network. Wherever I went I could find other Mormons. Once I left, I didn't have that anymore. I had to slowly build up friends.' And at first he felt guilty about going against some of the teachings that had been ingrained in him from his youth.'I remember drinking a Dr Pepper and feeling guilty because we weren't supposed to have caffeine,' he said. 'Then I thought that was silly. So I went out and bought a 12-pack, and drank all of it.' He felt better about the guilt but was up all night because of the caffeine.Another grievance: 'Never being quite good enough is part of many religious beliefs,' Huddleston said.Her daughter, Lockerby, agreed: 'Most religions set up these impossibly high standards, so you're set up to fail. Everything that's human is a sin.' 'But,' Huddleston said, 'I'm amazed at how much happier I am now that I'm not walking around with all that guilt.'

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